


Portal Residue

by gracedwithchaos



Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-22
Updated: 2015-02-28
Packaged: 2018-03-14 13:09:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3411794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gracedwithchaos/pseuds/gracedwithchaos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When a portal is opened, one needs to close it very carefully. If one does not, very bad things can happen. Tony does not know this and lives in Stark Tower, right under where a very large portal was once opened. Loki does know this and has decided to keep an eye on that tower. He doesn't know what will happen, but whatever it may be, he expects it to either amuse him greatly or at least cause a bit of mischief to those pitiful mortals who defeated him.</p><p>Eventual Loki/Tony with mentioned Tony/Pepper and a fair number of other ships thrown in. Set after Winter Soldier. Spoilers for everything up to that point.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! Thanks for deciding to read this fic! I hope you enjoy, but to properly have this fic make any kind of sense, we're gonna have to ignore the end of Thor 2 where Loki becomes king of Asgard.

For Tony Stark, the years after Loki’s invasion of New York were some of the most difficult of his life. After Afghanistan, he’d thrown himself into his work. Into turning his whole life’s work from something that did nothing but bring pain to something that would actually help people. It had been enough to get him through it and Tony felt like he was stronger for that time.

But New York was different. After that, he tried. He tried so hard to just throw himself into Iron Man again. After all, he just almost died in the terrifying vacuum of space. It wasn’t nearly as bad as being held in a cave and tortured and forced to build weapons of mass destruction. Or so Tony told himself. But that didn’t change the fact that every time he closed his eyes, he remembered doing the same thing in his suit, thinking he’d just run out of air and suffocate. Or that the darkness behind his lids became the darkness of space after all the ships blew up.

Then a terrorist tried to kill him. It was really just another day of being Iron Man. Shit like that, while it usually didn’t end up with his house being blown up, was just part of the job. Still, it helped him. Helped Tony get back to being Iron Man. He realized that he didn’t need the suits. He needed to help people. Tony Stark was on the way to getting past New York.

And then everything happened with Pepper. She was glad that he’d found his purpose in life again, but she thought that it was just more of his obsessing. Maybe she was right (she was definitely right). Tony spent almost every waking moment thinking of a new project. He had clean energy. Done. Now he was working on quick, easy, cheap ways to filter water. New ways to transport food. How to make said transported food last longer. How to increase the shelf life of vaccines. The last two needed Bruce’s help, but the doctor was more than happy to help and for perhaps once in his life, none of Tony’s experiments blew up. Whether that was due to Bruce’s no-explosions-in-the-lab rule or that what they were working on was highly non-explosive, Tony didn’t know. Either way, he was safer in there than he was flying about as Iron Man.

Pepper didn’t see it that way. She saw him spending every moment holed away. She saw him forgetting about their dates. She saw him walking into the kitchen half-starved from spending so much time around meat that any sort of food was unappetizing, basically only emerging when Bruce told him to eat. Pepper was thrilled that Tony was trying to help people. She just wished he wouldn’t kill himself in the process.

It was really only a matter of time before they broke up.

So Tony moved to his tower in New York. He spent three weeks drunk until Bruce, Rhodey, and Happy got him out of it. Then he and Bruce got back to work. He actually signed another military contract. This time to just create better armour to protect soldiers on the ground, with a whole bunch of clauses and conditions thrown in that said Tony would not be making any sort of weaponry and that he could back out if ever he wished. He probably wouldn’t, but it was a good thing to put in anyway, and the armour project gave him something to do when he wasn’t doing biochem with Bruce.

In this way, Tony Stark moved on. He made peace with his past and had a life in Stark Tower under the place where a portal had once been. You see, for all his genius and knowledge about basically everything, Tony Stark did not know one very important thing: improperly closed portals leave a kind of residue, and that is not something you want hanging over your head.

__________________________________________________  
Loki did not have a fun time of it after his failed invasion of New York. There was the excruciating pain left from the Hulk smashing him into the floor, the horrible embarrassment of being defeated and then captured by a bunch of mortals and his brother, the actual being held prisoner, the trial, the being stuck in a cell for a year, and then, ah yes, there was all that stuff with the Dark Elves and pretending to die. All very unpleasant. And on top of that, after everything, he was stuck on Svartalfheim, which, since all the Dark Elves were dead, was completely empty.

So, no, Loki was not enjoying his time after his defeat on Midgard.

The walk from where he parted from Thor and Jane to the closest passage to anywhere was at least three days, and Loki spent those days in absolute misery. He was the god of Mischief. He thrived on things happening. On entirely empty planets, nothing happened. After the second day, he was really starting to hate the sight of rocks. Thank the Norns that the closest portal should bring him to Vanaheim. Say what you would about the Vanir, at least they weren’t entirely surrounded by rocks.

The only fortunate thing about this situation was that Loki was not actually Aesir. The Aesir needed food and water just about as much as a mortal did, though they wouldn’t die from thirst or starvation for a while longer. But Frost Giants lived on a world of ice and snow. They did not require much nutrients, and by the third day, Loki was thanking anything he could think to thank that he didn’t need water. It was nightfall when he reached the passage, and he slipped through thankfully.

For a while after, he travelled from one world to another as he pleased until he found suitable place to spend his time. There were things he needed to figure out and other things he needed to prepare for.

Slowly, as Loki made his preparations, he became aware of an odd force in the Nine Realms. Something connected to him. It took some time, but the god realized that it was the portal he’d opened up to bring his army through. He turned his attention to that place and saw that someone was living under his portal. Stark. The inventor was living and working and sleeping under an inactive portal.

When he realized this, he laughed. That fool Selvig. In trying to stop Loki, he may have unleashed a worse kind of hell upon the mortal that now lived in that tower. Because Loki knew that portals are difficult things. If they aren’t closed properly, they leave a kind of residue. And that is not something one would wish to live under.

So it came that whenever he could spare it, Loki cast an eye to that place and waited for something to happen. No matter what it was, the god of Mischief was sure it would be marvelous.


	2. Chapter 2

Pepper Potts was pacing in her office, trying to figure out her place in life. For a long time, she’d worked as Tony’s assistant, and then she’d become CEO of Stark Industries. Well, she was still that. But after everything with Tony, she wasn’t sure that she could do that. Pepper chided herself. She should have known, really, not to get involved with her boss. He was the one person in the world who was off-limits. It wasn’t just for her reputation - though being known as the girl who slept with the boss was not something she’d ever wanted - but also because she had known from the start that it wouldn’t work out.

  
In her experience, Pepper found that most relationships - or at least most of her relationships - didn’t work out because the two people were in different places. With her first boyfriend after college, she’d dived right into the relationship, but he just hadn’t been interested in moving so quickly. In her next relationship, it was the opposite. He’d wanted kids and marriage and she had just become Mr Stark’s personal assistant and didn’t want to muck that up by spreading her time out between home and work. No matter how much the two people liked each other, it was just a relationship killer.

  
But with her and Tony, they’d been at exactly the same place relationship-wise. And at almost opposite places in every other aspect of their lives.

  
And that had bitten Pepper in the ass. She had barely spoken to Tony since the breakup. He was still the owner of Stark Industries and she had to run anything big by him, but most of that didn’t actually need to be face-to-face. Still, that was now affecting her work. In order to really run the company, Pepper needed to talk to Tony. She needed everyone in the office to stop looking at her strangely. She needed Happy to stop thinking that he needed to take sides for God’s sake!

  
Pepper tried to calm herself. She had let a relationship cause problems with her job. That was her fault, she couldn’t blame that one on Tony. Hell, most of it was probably in her head anyways.

  
Which was a most unfortunate thing to think at the time because it was as soon as Pepper had thought those words that her head felt as though it was being split in half. She screamed in pain as her vision went white and she collapsed to the floor.

__________________________________________  
 _Slowly, Pepper’s vision cleared and she saw - a road? She remembered this road. She knew this place. She’d grown up here. Suburban houses lined the streets with neatly trimmed trees and freshly watered lawns. This was the street of her memories. Pepper had driven down it recently in a burst of nostalgia and it was completely different. Whether this place of childhood had ever existed in such perfection or not was something she wasn’t sure about, but this was what she remembered._

  
 _Suddenly, as if from a bullet, two children shot past, screaming and laughing like they didn’t care if the neighbours heard them. One was a seven-year-old little girl with light ginger hair braided down her back, while the other was a boy about her age with dark brown hair and brown eyes. Pepper recognized them both. The little girl was her - her mother still had pictures of Pepper in that pretty red dress - and the little boy was Tony._

  
_Which made no sense whatsoever because not only were she and Tony not the same age, they hadn’t even met until they were both adults anyways so what the hell?_

  
_“Tag, you’re it!” the young Pepper cried, slapping Tony across the back and running away. Tony glared for a second before he was off after her, running behind a house that Pepper clearly remembered as belonging to an old lady with nasty little dogs. Cautiously, the older Pepper followed and found a situation she knew was real. Or almost. Little Pepper was hiding behind a tree, her dress torn and knee bleeding. The two dogs that lived at this house were outside, though the old lady was nowhere to be seen. One of them had bitten Pepper and she was crying._

  
_What had happened was this: Pepper’s dad had walked into their backyard for a moment and heard his daughter’s wails. He’d then valiantly shooed the dogs away and brought Pepper back home to fix up her knee and see if her mom could mend her dress._

  
_What Pepper now saw was this: little Tony came running around the house after Pepper and found her trapped by the dogs. He grabbed a stick and threw it, hitting the one dog in the shoulder and causing both of them to turn to face him. He then seemed to freeze, having acted on instinct and not sure what to do now. The dogs weren’t going after Pepper anymore - but now they were coming after Tony! Before anyone else made a move, however, little Pepper grabbed another stick and threw it at the dogs. Again they turned, this time confused. Pepper and Tony assaulted the animals with little sticks and stones until they ran away, tails between their legs._

  
_The children cheered and Pepper even let out a little whoop of joy._

_It was then that two things happened: little Pepper remembered her injury and she and Tony got inside to clean up; and someone touched Pepper on the shoulder._  
 _She whipped around, only to find Tony Stark staring at her. The grown-up one. And he was kinda see-through._

Pep? _he asked. His voice sounded odd, and Pepper was about to comment on it, but when she opened her mouth, it all disappeared._

________________________________________

Tony woke up from the odd dream in his own bed with a pounding headache, but little else to indicate anything was wrong. But that dream - it stayed with him.

  
He didn’t know that place, didn’t know who that little girl was - though now he figured that perhaps it was Pepper - he had no idea where the hell those ugly dogs came from, and to be honest, what the hell was that whole thing where Pepper just appeared? She hadn’t been there and then when the kids chased the dogs off, she was suddenly there cheering for them.

  
And that had been the end, hadn’t it?

  
“Hey, Jarvis,” Tony said to his ceiling, “remind me not to drink before bed.”

“Yes sir,” the AI replied, “Also, there is a call coming in from Miss Potts. Would you like to take it?”

______________________________________  
Loki saw everything that had happened and smirked. Portals were strange and often had minds of their own if not carefully controlled. This one seemed to have decided to cause a bit of trouble for at least one Avenger, and that was certainly something the God of Mischief could get behind.


	3. Chapter 3

“Hey, Pepper,” Tony said. He was in his living room in Stark Tower, not yet dressed, but wearing enough clothes that he could talk to Pepper on the phone.

“Tony?” her voice came through. She sounded a little panicked and more than a little stressed. Jarvis had said she was calling from her office and Tony wondered how often she spent this long at work. It was 3:30 AM after all, too late even for him to be up. He was usually in bed by the downright respectable time of one in the morning. Except on the nights when he wasn’t.

“Is something wrong?” he asked.

“Y-” Pepper started saying something. It sounded like a yes to Tony, but she stopped and paused for a bit.

“Pep?” he prompted, “If you need help, I can be there in a few hours. What’s wrong?” His mind raced with everything that could be happening at that moment. He didn’t know what could be so bad that she wouldn’t immediately say she needed help even after calling him, but it made him even more worried. She was Pepper. Anything she couldn’t handle was probably terrifying. And she was Pepper. Anything she needed, he would always be there.

Tony was halfway to his nearest Iron Man suit when Pepper said, “No-nothing. I guess - I just fell and, and hit my head. I must have knocked myself out. Had the weirdest dream. I guess I’m kind of out of it.” It sounded more like she was convincing herself than anything.

“Holy crap, are you okay?” Tony let out his words in a rush. They were most likely unintelligible to anyone who wasn’t fluent in Freaking-Out-Tony, which Pepper, conveniently, was. “You need to get to a hospital. You could have a concussion. What day of the week is it? Who’s president?”

Pepper laughed on the other end. “Do you even know the answer to those questions?”

“Um, Thursday?” Tony guessed. “And Steve?”

That only caused her to laugh even more. “Thank you, Tony. I’m sorry for bothering you so early in the morning. Did I wake you?”

“Not at all.” It was technically true. “I’ve been awake for hours.” That was not.

“Then we should both go to bed,” Pepper told him. “Goodnight, Tony.”

“I still think you should get yourself checked out -” Tony began, but was cut off by her hanging up. Putting the phone down, he stretched and rubbed his eyes before making his way back to his bedroom. He was already falling asleep when he realized that Pepper had mentioned having a weird dream too.

____________________________________  
Steve Rogers was in Germany. Where exactly, he couldn’t tell you (partly because his German was spotty at best and learned during World War Two, and partly because he was in the middle of a forest), but he had decided that it wasn’t too bad a country. Most of his experiences up until now had been when he was fighting people (Nazis or Loki), and some parts of it were really pretty when the threat of imminent death was removed.

Sam Wilson had a different opinion and felt rather offended that Captain America did not agree with him. The other man kept complaining about how all the trees meant that he couldn’t use his wings and to Sam’s utter annoyance, Steve actually found all the griping rather amusing. Kept saying Sam’s complaining reminded him of Dum Dum Dugan, who always insisted that there had to be a better way to get somewhere than walking.

They were currently camped out about fifty miles from a small Hydra base. Natasha’s intelligence had told them that the Winter Soldier was hunting down the organisation that used to control him and he was currently making his way through Germany. Both Steve and Sam thought it sounded a lot like Bucky trying to retrace the steps of his Howling Commando days.

Steve was pouring over a rough map he and Sam had made of the area. They were both wearing dark clothes that hid them well at night. But they weren’t going to do anything. At least not tonight. Which meant that Sam was sitting against a tree, napping. They were waiting for Bucky to come to this base. If the intel was right, it should be the next one on his hit list, but he had been acting sporadically. That also reminded Steve of what they’d been doing during World War Two. Back then, they’d mostly been finding information at one base, which led them to another. It wasn’t the most straightforward method and now that Steve thought back on it, it made sense that Hydra survived the death of Red Skull.

Looking at his resting friend, Steve thought about the past and the present. How was it that they were so similar? The future really wasn’t anything like what they’d thought it would be. Though he’d watched a couple episodes of the original Star Trek and except for the space travel thing, they seemed to have been on the right track.

Still, Howard’s promised flying car would certainly be neat.

______________________________________  
Tony slept in that morning, which was unusual. He wasn’t a morning person per se, but unless he stayed up unusually late the night before, he was generally able to drag himself out of bed and into his first cup of coffee before ten.

He barely remembered the strange dream he’d had except that it involved Pepper and dogs.

The call he did remember. Pepper had seemed sort of freaked out, now that he thought about it. Even when she’d laughed, it had been erratic. _What was that about?_ Tony wondered. He peered into his cup as if it had all the answers in the world. But both his mug and coffee remained quiet and so he drank the rest of it before going down to the labs, where Bruce was already working on their perfect water filtration system. One that didn’t sometimes poison the water it was meant to purify.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The reason for the stuff with Steve will become apparent soon. Like, in at most two chapters. Probably.


	4. Chapter 4

Loki had been living in a cave in a forest of Vanaheim for the past several months and by the Norns he was bored. It wasn’t that he didn’t know how to entertain his mind - he’d spent a year in a cell and the same three books did not provide much variance - but then it had seemed like his waiting would be eternal. Now he knew that it would not, but he could not yet act upon anything. His power was weakened from his time beneath Asgard and the Vanir were well-versed in magic. They would be able to feel it if he tried to present an illusion. So he could not be seen and he could not go to towns or cities. He was trapped in this stinking cave until he’d built up his magic again just as surely as he’d been trapped in his cell.

So he spent his time casting out his eye to see what was beyond his sight. It was the same kind of magic that allowed Heimdall to guard the Bifrost, but to a lesser degree. Loki would watch a single place in a single world for a time until it bored him. There were people who had once been his friends in Alfheim whom he watched over. They would not aid him now, but he remembered them with fondness and the ability to see them filled Loki with a pleasant kind of nostalgia. Sometimes he would look to places where interesting things occurred. He would watch battles fought between Jotun tribes or the underground courts of Nidavellir that often dissolved into various sides flinging insults at each other.

But perhaps the most promising thing to which Loki cast his eye was the portal. Or the place where the portal had once been. If he looked closely, there was still a rift there, but he did not bother to close it. It was far too small to pose any threat - and a visit from the Mad Titan would pose a real threat indeed - and it was interesting, so Loki allowed it to be. But mostly he watched the mortal who lived beneath that spot of sky.

Anthony Stark. Iron Man. In his invasion of Midgard, Loki had not been particularly interested in this mortal. Or he hadn’t until the man threatened him without his armour. He had then recognized that act for what it was. Most would think Stark brave, but Loki saw something else. He was reckless. Even with his new group of friends who depended on him to stall the invader, he had not used any shield to keep himself alive besides his words. Now, Loki knew the power of words, but they could not stop a magic blast or a knife through the jugular. He knew what sort of man Stark was. The kind that thought so little of his own life that he did not expect others to think of it either.

And that sort of man could be very entertaining.

Unfortunately, most of what Stark did was work in his lab. The mortal who became a monster worked alongside him, but Banner was of little interest to Loki. Nor did it seem as though he was of any interest to the portal. Tendrils of blue magic slithered over Stark. Around his arms, over his head, plunged into the center of that light circle in the mortal’s chest. And, most interestingly, into his eyes. How Stark could see with two bright blue tentacles sticking into his eyeballs, but Midgardians did seem particularly blind to magic, so it was possible that he just didn’t notice.

Loki marvelled in the potential in this slithering magic, but it had been nearly a week and nothing had happened since the incident with Stark’s ex-lover. Ah, yes, that had been an interesting night. A blue tentacle had suddenly left the inventor’s forehead and shot through the sky and across many miles before burying into the cranium of Miss Potts. Then nothing had happened for several hours. Stark had gone to bed and Loki had taken up watching the woman to see if anything would occur. Sure enough, it had and she had collapsed.

The God of Mischief had seen the dream and seen the magic that covered it all like a web. He knew what parts had been real and which parts were fabricated. For example, that was truly the image of Stark as a child, yet the boy had never been in that place. 

But when it was all over, the thread between the two mortals had thinned and finally snapped, as if the portal had decided to undo what had been done. Loki did not understand what was happening, but it occupied him and he had time to spare, so he idly wondered what his portal had in store.

___________________________________  
However, as Loki focussed on the portal, there were many places and many events that went unnoticed. One such place was outside a secret Hydra base in Germany.

Steve and Sam were expecting Bucky to attack the base at night. So during the day, they rested and waited, taking shifts or playing cards. Sam taught Steve a few new games, Steve taught Sam a few old games. Mostly they played poker. When one of them wasn’t sleeping.

But because they expected him to attack at night, they weren’t ready when the Winter Soldier walked into the base at noon and started firing on anything that moved.

The two men hiding nearby heard this immediately and started running. They had enough time for Steve to get his shield on his arm and Sam to get his wings ready before they were at the edge of the trees. Falcon shot up into the air while Cap kept running. One of the benefits of the serum was that he could run farther than most people without getting tired.

The base was plunged into chaos. Bucky was shooting his way through the twenty five men posted there. He hardly moved except to avoid the bullets that were fired his way, and even then, Steve could see that he was hit.

Skirting the edge of the base, Steve focussed on the people who had guns but weren’t actively shooting at his friend. Bucky could more than handle those guys. Meanwhile, Sam swooped into the middle of the action, kicking one of the Hydra agents in the back of the head and knocking him out. He then flew back up and around to hit another agent.

Considering that they were three men against twenty five, it didn’t take long for the all the Hydra agents to be either knocked out or killed. Bucky stood in the center of the base, chest heaving, his automatic gun held loosely in his metal hand. Steve took a step towards him, “Bucky?”

The Winter Soldier swung the gun up until it was pointed at Cap’s head. On the sidelines, Sam watched nervously. He’d taken on the Winter Soldier before and that metal arm had ripped off both his wings before throwing him to the ground.

“What are you doing her?” Bucky said quietly. When Steve didn’t answer, he yelled, “What are you doing here?!”

Steve dropped his shield and ignored Sam’s curse and warning through the coms. “I came here to find you.”

Sam pushed off into the air, hovering above the scene between the two men from the 40s.

The gun wavered before its grip was shifted and Bucky held it like a club. For a long moment, they all stayed very still, and then the Soldier lunged towards Steve with a yell. Sam dropped like a rock, ready to take him out. And Steve did nothing, just stood there like it didn’t matter.

The moment before all three men collided, both Bucky and Steve collapsed to the ground, unconscious and dead to the world.


End file.
